Doug Wagner, Author at Sunwapta Solutions

14 Aug 2009

A Failure to Communicate

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:25:27-06:00August 14th, 2009|Categories: Doug's Blog, Leadership, Software Development|

Ever play that game where you take a secret statement, pass it on through a subsequent chain of people. The person at the end says the statement out loud and everyone laughs at how it different it is from what it started out as.

Now add in not just memory of what was said, but include an understanding of what was said, especially if the problem is complex.

The meaning and details are both important and if either aspect is lost, good communications have not happened.

This means that in any development project where there is more than one person involved, there is […]

11 Aug 2009

Quick Update on Website

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:25:33-06:00August 11th, 2009|Categories: Current Events, Doug's Blog, Marketing, Sales|

We have our content management system configured now and our template 90% implemented. I haven't been blogging too much lately mainly because I am busy writing content for our website while simultaneously doing application design for a couple of other web applications.

While writing site content, I was thinking about how much fun it would be to do the entire site as a parody of the normally serious and deathly boring technical corporate website… and oh yeah, throw in some of the standards for differentiation marketing:

"Our developers have been extremely agile for years, long before agile became popular as […]

10 Aug 2009

Dance Through Life

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:25:37-06:00August 10th, 2009|Categories: Current Events, Doug's Blog|

Paula Callihoo's new dance studio website is now live.

4 Aug 2009

The Gloves Are Off

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:25:40-06:00August 4th, 2009|Categories: Current Events, Doug's Blog, Technology|

I was off reading some blogs today and came across an interesting exchange in the comments section.

It started off on a technical argument, got nasty and then got personal.

When the insults on personal choices of cell phones started flying, I knew the gloves were off.

Yup, your choice of a cell phone says a lot about you.

The Mac, iMac, iPod and iPhone were all initially about going against the herd. Forget the technical arguments for a minute. People are proud that they are not getting what the majority are getting, it says something about you. And Apple? Brilliant at consumer marketing… they […]

31 Jul 2009

Age and Money – A Matter of Perspective

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:25:43-06:00July 31st, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Current Events, Doug's Blog|

A business client and friend of mine is turning 50 on Monday.

For humans 50 years is a long time.

But $50 is not much money.

50 years is the same as 18,262.5 days. $18,262.5 is slightly more than what you would make on minimum wage in Alberta in a year of working full-time.

50 years is the same as 438,300 hours. $438,300 is nice.

There are 26,298,000 minutes and 1,577,880,000 seconds in 50 years.

$1.5 billion is a nice big number and few achieve it.

If you earn 1 dollar every second of your life, you can have $1.5 billion in 50 years.

Treat every second of your life as […]

29 Jul 2009

Getting Marketing Feedback

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:25:46-06:00July 29th, 2009|Categories: Doug's Blog, Marketing, Sales|

If you want unbiased feedback on your marketing material or a new product where do you go? If your answer is:

Friends,
Family, or
Employees.

You should seriously reconsider.

While friends and family may try to give you honest feedback, generally they are naturally biased… they will generally tell you what you want to hear. Why? To show their support. After all, isn't that what family is all about and why you chose your friends?

Employees are influenced by balancing showing support, not making their boss annoyed, and trying to be honest.

Besides, none of these people are likely to be representative of your customers.

So valid […]

28 Jul 2009

Choosing a Content Management System

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-06T12:25:18-06:00July 28th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Marketing, Sales, Technology|

Historically we have been a Microsoft .NET shop with some experience in Java. It is not that we are against other technologies, it is just that we don’t see a reason to jump all over if the tools you have do the trick.

In the case of choosing a content management system (CMS) for our corporate website, we looked at open source and low cost CMS products on the .NET platform and found them not as mature as we needed.

We have therefore chosen Joomla as our CMS. It is a well supported and widlely used CMS developed on the PHP platform […]

27 Jul 2009

About The Value of Blogging

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:26:04-06:00July 27th, 2009|Categories: Doug's Blog, Marketing|

Seth nails the value of blogging. I do it as much for the clarity as I do for the audience.

I often find that I start out with a blog topic, start writing and by the end, my own understanding has improved. Teaching some things is like that too. It really makes you think about what and how you are doing something; sometimes you even catch mistakes in your current thinking or abilities.

27 Jul 2009

Marketing Budget Allocation For Results

By Doug Wagner|2017-06-06T16:06:43-06:00July 27th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Marketing, Sales|Tags: business advice, Clients, Cold Calling, Customers, Entrepreneurship, Lead Generation, marketing, Marketing Budget, Marketing Budget Allocation, Marketing Strategy, Networking, Prospecting, Referrals, sales, small business, SMB|

As per the last two posts (The Value of a New Customer and Marketing Budget 101) I talked about one way of determining your marketing/sales budget.

If you want a simpler method, allocate a percentage of total revenue.

Now the question is where to spend your money for maximum effect.

There are basically four sources of future sales:

Existing customers,
Referrals (word of mouth),
Prospecting, cold calling and networking, and
New leads from marketing.

You will want to allocate funding (or effort) to […]

23 Jul 2009

Marketing Budget 101

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:26:10-06:00July 23rd, 2009|Categories: Doug's Blog, Leadership, Marketing, Sales|

Now that you know how much you are willing to spend on acquiring a new customer the next part is easy… and very hard.

How many new customers do you want?

Infinity is a good long-term goal for the highly competitive but lets bound the question a bit.

How many new customers can you handle over the next year?

Consider your ability to:

Service or supply your customers,
Your ability to grow your capacity including capital costs and time to do so, and
How big you really want to be and other factors.

Don't forget to include any customers you might lose over time in the equation.

Now […]

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